


Your Secrets Become My Truth

by waltzmatildah



Category: Rookie Blue
Genre: Gen, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-18
Updated: 2012-09-14
Packaged: 2017-10-27 11:50:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/295540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waltzmatildah/pseuds/waltzmatildah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>The flashing of diamonds, plural, and the wide-eyed grins to match, morph mid-afternoon into lights and sirens and radio calls that static the space inside his skull.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Your Secrets Become My Truth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [catteo](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=catteo).



Jo is gunned down in the line of duty on the same day Andy and Sam announce their engagement.

The flashing of diamonds, plural, and the wide-eyed grins to match, morphing mid-afternoon into lights and sirens and radio calls that static the space inside his skull.

It was a drug sting gone bad, and really, isn't it always? She'd been reassigned to a plain clothes unit in a station on the opposite side of the city. Little more than cursory nods at crime scenes exchanged between them since she'd left all those weeks and months ago. He'd known where she'd been working and, vaguely, what she'd been working on. He knew very little else these days and it's a fact he comes to realise with an earth-shifting shudder.

“Callaghan?”

The voice calling his name seems insistent, cautious, concerned. All three in the space of several stuttered syllables.

“Luke?” Softer this time, gentle in a way that grates at all his unravelling edges. “Are you okay?”

He laughs and the sound vibrates the tile beneath his shoes. He looks at them, looks to see if the ground is shaking as much as he think it just might be. Notices a dark scuff mark on his toe-tip and panics suddenly. Wonders if maybe it's blood. Her blood.

There'd been so much of it after all. So much black, copper-red tracked throughout the room after the first shot that had carved a ragged path through her insides failed to kill her and she'd fought valiantly to live.

Fought and then failed nonetheless.

He thinks he might know the feeling all too well.

 

 

 

Familiar blue and white crime scene tape cordons off the inner city property. One loose end flapping its protest wildly in the early December wind. Wet snow is falling, clouding vision that is already blurring out in his periphery. He has a vague awareness of the cold. Biting at his lips and freezing his lungs with every hurried inhale. Exhale.

In and out and cold. And cold. And cold.

Fingers close around his wrist. Tight. Black leather gloves that grip more solidly than they have any right to. He thinks he might float away if they loosen. Isn't sure, in that moment, whether he's pleased or disappointed when the strong-hold remains.

_“... so messy... what a complete... shouldn't be here...”_

The voice that he's convinced belongs to the same person as the gloved fingers rises and falls with the wind. Loud and soft with words he can't bring himself to listen to.

He has no right to feel like the bottom of the entire world has just dissolved out from underneath him. They weren't together. Hadn't been for so long he thinks he'd started to forget what she sounded like when she laughed. When she shouted at him. When she cried.

And somehow he thinks that the distance only serves to make it all that much worse. Wraps itself around the guilt that he feels might just be about to drown him, and threatens to send him heavily to his knees.

Lifting his eyes from the snow-wet pavement beneath his scuffed shoes, he catches a glimpse of the harried activity playing out, movie scene-like, in his immediate surrounds. Can't help but think, wryly, that now would be a good time to rob a bank. The inconspicuous red brick apartment block teeming with more law enforcement officials than he thought Toronto could ever dread to need.

“Hey, Homicide, you back with me or what?”

The candour of the sentence startles him. Blood red lips that round their way around the consonants and vowels that comprise the words. Her head is tilted a inch or so to the left. Universal for _something's not right here..._ He feels his own mouth open, prepare to reassure her that he's fine. That _everything's fine_. That they both just need to do their jobs.

But the front door opens then. And the medical examiner rolls a blue, tarp covered gurney down the snow frosted path to the awaiting ambulance. Doesn't bother with lights and sirens as the vehicle rounds the corner at the end of the street and is pulled out into the mid-afternoon traffic.

It is too late for urgency, after all.

He bends double. Retches into the gutter. Feels hot tears scald a path of least resistance to his chin before he can reach a trembling hand in their direction in an attempt to swipe them into oblivion.

The hand around his wrist drops away. He feels light as a feather suddenly. Loose and lost in anti-gravity.

He's pushed gently to seated. Hears voices shouting for a medic as he's suddenly ninety degrees to the right of vertical. Manages to offer up an adamant _"please, no..."_ that has the request being rescinded as quickly and as completely as it had been made.

 

 

 

Her fingers shift insistently across his shoulder blades. Up and back and up again. He's not convinced she knows she's doing it, and he wants to scream obscenities into her face so she'll stop _touching him_ , but the suffocating fear that she might listen, might actually do as he asks, means his lips stay locked tight around the words. Keep them in and swallowed down, whole.

Choking.

She drags him blindly to what he can only assume is a squad car. A soft seat settles underneath him and a bottle of water is pressed into the palm of a hand he can barely control. He thinks all his internal organs have shifted; are lodged high in the back of his throat. Dragging air in and around them is fast becoming impossible.

He can't decide if he cares.

He was shot once. Twice. He runs his fingertips over his lips to see if he's still here...

He is.

_Damn..._

“Drink the water...” She's ordering him insistently. Gail. Not Jo. They have the same authoritative air when it comes to telling him what to do and their voices keep getting twisted up and tangled in his head.

He drinks so she'll shut up and the noise will stop.

 

 

 

It gets dark. Which is almost funny. _The world keeps turning_ , that's what they say. Trite condolences in the face of unimaginable tragedy. Daylight becomes moonlight becomes midnight before it all starts again.

Ready or not.

He's sitting on his front steps when she arrives. Not-Jo. He's cold through to his hollowed out marrow but his bones have forgotten how to shiver. She stops in front of him. Her breath billowing, white clouds of fog that match the viscous air inside his skull. She disappears out behind it on every exhale and he forgets she's there for a beat before it fades on the breeze and she reappears.

Magic.

“Oh, Luke...”

And the instant pity becomes a tangible entity that props itself on the pavement between them. He wants it gone.

“I can't find my key...”

He doesn't know if that's the truth. Can't remember looking for it. Just knows his hands were too heavy to reach the height of the lock anyhow. Dead weights, curled into his lap. He blinks down at them, almost surprised to find that they're still there. Still attached.

He could be convinced they'd been torn from his shoulder-blades and tossed into the winter wind. Buried under snow drifts and frozen for safe-keeping. For the spring, when he might want them back again.

He has no use for them right now.

 

 

 

She shifts him like he's dough. Wrests at his jacket until she finds what it is she's looking for. He thinks it might be his heart and lungs.

And then there's light spilling over his shoulders. Illuminating the snowflakes that dance and drift in celebration of something he can't begin to fathom.

She's back to speaking then, saying his name so many times it loses all manner of meaning...

_“Luke, Luke, Luke.”_

He follows her because it's easier than the alternative.

_“Gail, Gail, Gail.”_

_Not-Jo, Not-Jo, Not-Jo._

She drags him through his own house. He wants to stop and show her the spot where all his blood leaked out, but she's turning lights on and off as they go and not slowing down long enough for him to vocalise much of anything beyond, _oh_.

When she pushes him into the bathroom and then follows in behind, he thinks she might be lost. But then she's tearing his clothes off and puddling them on the floor by his feet and turning on the taps in the shower as he stands there and tries to figure out why his jaw aches all the way through to his eye-balls.

And how it is that her lips are always the brightest part of his day.

 

 

 

He imagines kissing them. Shuts his eyes and slides his back down the water slick tile and lets the sudden heat fill all the emptied out spaces where little pieces of him have chipped away and disappeared, swirling.

Her arms are wrapped around him, holding him together fiercely by the seams. She's still got her jeans on and the absurdity of the moment is profound.

He thinks he might be crying, but he might also be dead. Or dying. Or not there at all. And so he doesn't dwell on the possibility for too long.

 

 

 

She disappears for an eternity then...

Comes back wearing his clothes, matter of fact, as though the transformation were a common occurence that required no explanation.

And maybe it doesn't.

 

 

 

There's a lamp on in his bedroom. He never uses it, can't even remember buying it, and he wonders, absently, whether it might actually be Andy's. Its light is casting elongated shadows on the back wall and he watches her silhouette as she moves through the room.

She's so sure of herself. So confident and in control and getting things done. He makes a mental note to ask her how she does it later and then fills in the rest of the page with white noise and static.

“You should try and get some sleep,” she says. And he nods because, instinctively, he knows that it's what she wants.

She nods back and he's pleased he got something right.

He knows he needs to thank her. To reassure her. To make some kind of sound that isn't the screeching of his breath as it whistles past his teeth. She hands him a t-shirt and he follows her gaze down to his lap. Watches as she lingers over the angry scarring on his chest.

She runs her fingers lightly over the raised skin before dragging her hand up to his face. Cupping her palm around his cheek and tilting his chin back up in her direction.

“Are you going to be okay?”

He opens his mouth to answer but doesn't have the energy required to lie.

“Can you stay?” His voice sounds foreign as it bounces around the room. Barely more than a whisper.

He can see her hesitate, a sudden movement that gives her uncertainty away in a stammered beat.

“Please?” _Please, please..._

She nods then, slowly. And he breathes.

It feels like the first time he's done so in decades.


	2. From All I Have Torn Apart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Warning | There are suicidal themes in this chapter]

He dreams in vivid red.

A languid river that snakes its way from one flashing image to the next. Red lips. Red shoes. Red blood; hers. His.

Again.

Wakes up alone and with the tang of copper on his teeth. Gags twice around the phantom taste before his limbs will co-ordinate into something resembling motion. 

The bathroom floor is still littered with the detritus of hours prior. Clothing, still damp from snow melt and sweat, lies puddled by the shower door. Towels, plural, discarded in the tub. It takes him a moment to remember. 

Then; he doubts he’ll ever forget.

She’s gone. His brain no longer differentiates between the two; not that it matters, they’re both gone. 

The oppressive silence settles heavy on his chest. Breathing around the pressure is an almost impossible undertaking, and when he lets the panic consume him completely he discovers something almost peaceful in the space that exists between there and here.

Between rigid horror and oxygen deprivation.

Lets the cold leach from the tile and deep into his bones. Settle.

 

 

 

  
There’s a note on the kitchen table. He can imagine her scrawling the words in the half-dark as she made her escape. He doesn’t know if he truly expected her to stay. Doesn’t think he expected anything at all to be honest. 

_I’ll call you_ is all it says.

In the end he’d slept, or pretended to, curled up tight on the bathroom floor for most of the night, his left knee now protesting its loud annoyance with every step. He lets the sharp pulse earth him as he makes coffee he knows he won’t drink, half-heartedly irons a shirt he can’t imagine wearing, and tries to locate a pair of work shoes that actually match.

His cell phone bleats to life every few minutes or so. He can hear the shrill ring from the other room as he studiously ignores its insistent calling. 

He can hear whispers. Laughter. Achingly familiar as it tingles across his fingertips. _Jo_. 

_Not Jo._

 

 

 

He’s behind the wheel of his car and turning the corner before he registers that movements have been made. He’s pulling into a vacant parking slot at the precinct before he realises that he’s navigated his way through the early morning traffic. What has happened in the intervening minutes, days, hours, he can’t even begin to remember.

 

 

 

Inside, the station is in full flight; an almost tangible wall of sound that he finds impossible to pass through. He stops to stalled instead, just inside the doors. There’s an unfamiliar buzz, a hum that ramps up the pounding in his chest. Uniformed officers he doesn’t recognise are milling around whiteboards and sloppily pouring coffee into Styrofoam cups and he blinks, confused. 

“What are you doing here?”

A hand closes around his bicep, drags him further inside the precinct and in the direction of his office. He follows along blindly, her words on loop.

_‘What are you doing here? What are you doing here? What are you doing here?’_

He’s here because he has nowhere else to be.

And a job to do.

It’s a stupid question. _What are you doing here?’_ He doesn’t bother to answer it. Breaks away instead and moves to walk behind his desk, waits desperately for muscle memory to take over in the hope he might actually shift into something resembling functional.

 

 

 

“Luke?”

Her voice breaks through the viscous fluid he feels suspended in and raising his head takes more effort than it ever should. He gives up before he makes it all the way to eye contact.

It’s probably for the best.

“Mmm hmmm?”

“Have you eaten anything?”

And he thinks her words are just getting more and more ridiculous.

“What’s going on out there?” he asks instead; realises he doesn’t actually know the answer to her question and figures that, whatever it is, yes, no, maybe, _maybe not_ , it’s all irrelevant anyway.

“Luke...”

He gets his chin to vertical this time. Snap. 

“I said, _what’s going on out there?_ Because something is and either you tell me now or I’ll go find someone who will.”

 

 

 

His brain is making a concerted effort to forcibly shove his eyeballs out of their sockets. The headache radiates to his toes with every stammered pulse of his heartbeat.

Her stupid questions and her unwarranted sympathy are not helping.

She steps back, palms up in a mock surrender of sorts, and he’s pretty sure he should feel bad but he doesn’t because he can’t. He has no room for it. Or maybe he is full of empty spaces.

He can no longer tell. But, either way...

“We think we’ve located the shooter from yesterday.”

And all the air in the room evaporates.

“Where?”

“There’s a house in Fairbank. It’s out of our area which is why the extra uniforms are here. Frank convinced them to set up HQ at Fifteen because we have better resources or something. Personally, I think it’s just because he doesn’t trust anyone else to do it right-”

He can see her lips moving around her words; dizzying. Bright red punctuation marks for the consonants and vowels. The staccato sound of her voice gets lost somewhere in the middle of it all...

 

 

 

  
The heel of his hand pressed against his forehead, he scrunches up his face and gives himself three seconds to breathe before; “Okay, so, where are we at?”

“We?” she parrots, “ _We_ are not _at_ anywhere. _I_ am going back out there in a minute to help Traci and Jerry, and _you_ are going to drink some coffee and sit at your desk and look at cold cases-”

He laughs because... yeah.

How about, _No_.

“Luke, seriously. You look like actual crap. And they won’t let you anywhere near the investigation after yesterday-”

“‘After yesterday’ what?”

She sighs, her frustration almost an entity he can reach out and touch.

“Luke-” Pity laced through every letter.

He puts his hand up, palm out, a physical barrier between himself and the truth he can’t even begin to acknowledge.

“Just, stop.” He forces eye contact with her; pleads, “Please stop saying my name and-”

_Please stop sounding so completely like... her._

 

 

 

  
In the end, they compromise. If and when things happen, he rides with her. And he eats half a blueberry bagel. Half because it was her breakfast and the rest of it has already been devoured.

He can’t help but reconcile he’s being baby sat by a rookie; knows she talked to Frank and Jerry and is only half pretending that he doesn’t care.

“Hey, Peck?” he says, staring at her profile, memorising the dark sweep of her lashes as she updates paperwork methodically on the other side of the room, one pen between her lips and another threaded through her pony-tailed hair.

She looks up with a cautious frown and he hates that that’s her default around him now. 

“Yeah?” Mumbled around the pen she doesn’t bother to remove.

“Thanks?” with an accompanying shrug. Like maybe he’s still not sure; which would be nothing less than the truth, after all.

 

 

 

“So.” She draws the single syllable out, cautious in a way that doesn’t really suit her, and he’s already certain he’s not going to like where the rest of her sentence heads. “What was the deal between you two, anyway?”

And there it is.

He laughs; a reflexive bark that gets stuck against his teeth on the way out. Choking.

The pen has been removed from between her lips, she’s twisting it between her fingertips, faux-casual, and he lets the rhythmic motion distract him from the genuine curiosity in her voice. Shrugs in lieu of a verbal response because there’re only so many times you can attempt to answer that very question inside your own head before catatonia sets in.

She sighs; pointed.

He shrugs again, with emphasis this time.

Implied: _Please stop talking..._

“Were you a ‘thing’?” Air quotes with the fingers not twirling the pen. And he thinks it’s none of her business but he also thinks he’d have frozen to death on his front step last night if it wasn’t for her and so...

“We were a thing... once.” A dry swallow that gets stuck in his throat. “It was a long time ago.” 

“A ‘thing’ thing? Like you and Andy were a thing?”

He lies to himself that the sudden tears are inexplicable when his vision blurs mid escape and evade. 

 

 

 

  
Nothing really happens until late-afternoon and he’s managed to pass the intervening hours by alternately disappearing into the bathroom to dry swallow Advil capsules at regular intervals or staring blankly at the white board in the main briefing room; all post it notes and mug shots, crime scene photos and other unspeakable images.

His fingers trace the familiar curve of her jaw when he’s sure no-one’s looking; leave his prints on the matt finish, his imprint on her skin. 

_Jo._

Hers, well and truly beneath his...

“I’m so sorry...”

His own personal theme song; too little, too late.

 

 

 

She makes a cursory plea for him to stay in the car that they both know he fully intends to ignore. Her door is barely closed before he’s climbing out the passenger side and reaching for his gun and thinking twice before shoving it back into its holster, lest he completely lose his shit and shoot _her_ instead.

Or himself.

It wouldn’t be the first time his own bullets almost killed him...

But she’s running and then she’s out of sight before he can really put together a semblance of a plan; barely manages not to trip over the curb as he makes his way up and onto the sidewalk.

Reaches for a whole new level of pathetic.

 

 

 

  
The radio he’s forgotten he’s carrying comes to life then. A short burst of static followed by a string of words he can barely decipher. Gail’s voice offers up the only reply, clearer than the initial message but still little more than white noise as his vision pulses, black and bright, bright white, in time with the pounding in his skull.

Images of her with her insides spilled, slick and sliding across the sidewalk, flood his visual field; have him screaming her name into the dancing snow drifts as he lurches his way across someone’s front yard, heads towards the alley she’d moments before disappeared into.

 

 

 

  
And he’s not thinking of retribution until, all of a sudden, the heady notion has flooded every last inch of him.

 

 

 

  
“Luke.”

He can’t begin to decipher in which direction the sound is coming from. It echoes thunderously off the walls, through the leaves of the trees he can no longer see, along the lengths of his own sluggish synapses.

“Luke.”

His gun is drawn. He knows that much. It wasn’t and then it was and he doesn’t actually remember making the co-ordinated movements required to dislodge it from its holster but he can see the top of the barrel, feel the ache of it in his rigid grip, taste the absolute fury that burns a line of fire from his gut to the very tip of his tongue.

“Luke.”

The muzzle is pressed into flesh that doesn’t give. Skin covering skull covering brain matter.

One squeeze of the trigger and it’s over.

“Luke.” 

He wonders, absently, if this is what a heart attack feels like. A stroke perhaps. 

Florid psychosis.

“Luke.”

The dealer, no more than a pathetic kid, is on his knees in the snow. Back to the wall and one hand behind his head. Eyes closed, waiting, his other arm clutched to his chest and slow-seeping red staining his sleeve. He’d put a bullet in Jo’s chest and maybe she’d exacted some semblance of her own revenge before he put another one between her eyes.

_Waiting, waiting, waiting..._

Execution style. Just like this could be.

“Luke.”

 _“Stop calling me that!”_ Screamed into the ether. 

 

 

 

“Detective Callaghan, put down your weapon.” The same voice, but now, infinitely altered.

She appears in his peripheral vision then, her own weapon drawn and the picture of calm. 

“Look at me.”

He does because obeying her command is the only thing he has left and all propensities for independent thought left him hours ago.

“You don’t want to do this.”

She’s wrong. He does. He wants to more than he can remember ever wanting anything. Figures Jo deserves at least this much from him...

 _I’m so sorry…_

And other useless words he never quite managed to say.

His gaze wavers, the muzzle of his gun, the body bag that zipped her up and took her away, blood and blood and blood and then, bright red lips that always have something to say.

“Gail?” _Fuck._

Sirens build in the stillness around them then. The back-up she’d called for hours, minutes, days ago.

“Luke, it’s okay...” Infinitely understanding.

“No.” Because it’s not.

 

 

 

He drops his weapon. Slow-motion falling.

There’s a split second where the kid with the bullet hole in his arm locks eye contact. A dare. He hopes his own say, _do it_.

_Shoot me._

He already knows what it feels like and it’s no worse than this.

 _Shoot me._

 

 

 

He’s sideways in the snow then. An immovable object.

And the kid is screaming obscenities into the atmosphere above him, or maybe that’s just Gail, and there’s someone sitting on his chest, heavy, and he wants to laugh but he can’t because he doesn’t think he’s breathing.

_I’m so sorry…_

The hysteria settles deep in his bones instead; embracing.

 

 

 

She drags him into the back of their squad car, her fury catching on his edges. Nothing has gone to plan today.

She opens her mouth to speak, a red-ringed O and a finger pointed in his face. But there is only silence, and she backs back out of the vehicle, slams the door to closed instead in a move that says everything she needs to. Turns to look at him through the snow fogged glass before walking away.

Her back, the least he deserves.

There’s snow in the shoes he vaguely remembers searching so hard for that morning, and his jacket is filled with fresh powder from the Sam Swarek tackle into the ground he’s just received, and his hands are still shaking when she comes back; slides into the front and turns in her seat to face him.

“The way I see it, you have exactly two options…”

He blinks. It is all he can manage.

“Either I take you to the ER and have you sedated or you give me an address and I take you to your family.”

It takes him three precise counts to realise that she’s not joking.

Not even a little bit.

 

 

 

“You screamed at a cop killer to shoot you, Luke-”

He does remember doing that but definitely didn’t think it had been out loud…

“I didn’t mean it.”

Even though he thinks he probably did. At the time.

“And that’s not even counting all the _other_ things that just happened. Personally, I voted for the sedation but Frank seems to thi-”

“You talked to Frank about me?”

“Yes, I talked to Frank about you. I talked to Oliver, too. Three quarters of fifteen saw that, Luke. If Sam hadn’t…”

She trails off, deflates around a series of rapid blinks before he watches as she visibly pulls herself back together; a physical change in her features as his own frozen insides shift sideways in response.

“Oliver wanted the ambos to take you now, Luke, okay? This is serious and I am not joking. I don’t really know the story between the two of you, but obviously you are not okay, you aren’t even in the same _postal code_ as okay, and so you get two choices…”

He lets her speak uninterrupted because he has nothing to say.

And no will to fight her.

He wonders if maybe that’s part of the problem.

 

 

 

The squad car’s rear doors are locked from the inside; he knows this without needing to check because they’re always locked from the inside. 

He lets himself fall sideways ‘til he’s horizontal across the backseat, closes his eyes against the image of her peering through the partition at him. 

“I have nowhere to go.”

The words stick in his throat; sandpaper and glue.

“Then the ER it is…”

“No.” He shakes his head against the seat and tries not to think about who might have sat there last. “You don’t understand. I have _nowhere to go_. Except home. Or to the station. Or maybe The Penny but…”

He rolls awkwardly onto his back, studies the myriad scuff marks on the roof in another attempt not to fall apart in front of her, _again_ , and he figures she can’t possibly pity him more than she already does so...

“I literally have nowhere else to go.”

 

 

 

She drives. He remains prone on the backseat, carefully breathing around the knee-deep fear she’ll dump him in an ER bay with a note explaining how he’s gone crazy and no-one else wants him.

The radio chatters inanely in the background, if he listens closely he can track the movements back at the station. If he listens closely.

Which he doesn’t.

She cuts the engine and the world goes silent. He thinks, if he could freeze time, now would be it. Quiet emptiness.

Hollow.

As she pulls the door at his feet open he catches a glimpse of his house behind her; familiar. The sweet relief as her pointedly outstretched hand comes into view is palpable.

He pushes up to seated and reaches forward, locks his fingers in hers; solid. She stalls for a beat, reconsiders perhaps, before: “Please don’t make me regret this…”


End file.
